Modern computing devices have become ubiquitous tools for personal, business, and social uses. As such, many modern computing devices are capable of connecting to various data networks, including the Internet and corporate intranets, to retrieve and transmit/receive data communications over such networks at varying rates of speed. To facilitate communications between computing devices, networks typically include one or more network devices (e.g., network switches, network routers, servers, other compute and/or store computing devices, etc.) to route communications (i.e., network packets) from a source computing device to a destination computing device. As the network packets are transmitted from the source computing device, processed by network devices according to its network flow, and received by the destination computing device, the network packets may be transmitted in bursts at rates higher than can be supported by each of the network devices and/or the destination computing device. Such network traffic bursts may cause congestion at various points (i.e., network devices, destination computing device, etc.) across the network, which may result in a reduced overall network efficiency caused by network packet queueing delays, network packet loss, and decreased throughput, for example.
Various methods have been introduced to reduce the congestion attributable to the bursty network traffic, including packet pacing. Packet pacing is a technology in which the transmission of network packets is evenly spaced over a duration corresponding to the round-trip-time (RTT). Some packet pacing methods involve the source computing device transmitting the network packets at a rate defined by the source computing device, thereby spreading out the transmission of the network packets, as opposed to transmitting the packets in a single burst. To determine the rate, network stacks regularly monitor end-to-end latency, bandwidth, and rate loss, which may be compensated for by adjusting packet size. However, certain offload operations, such as segmentation operations offloaded to hardware to control throughput (i.e., the amount of data to transmit with each transmission), generally do not have a means by which to incorporate such information from the stack when transmitting the packets on the wire. As such, the aforementioned compensation may be lost when undergoing such operations.